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Public and private organizations are often called upon to make decisions on geographical questions that involve a multitude of feasible alternatives and multiple, often conflicting, evaluation criteria. Siting new hospitals, schools and factories; managing forests and rivers; locating new highways and bridges; operating shipping and transportation networks, are but a few examples. The decisions are often made in the context of competing decision makers and interest groups, with conflicting sets of values. This book presents a formal mechanism for dealing with these situations, based on capturing the information in a Geographical Information System and processing it to derive optimal recommendations for dealing with complex geographical questions. This text introduces the techniques of decision making from the fields of operations research, systems engineering and management science to the GIS community. It adds quantitative support to spatial decision making, and provides examples, questions and problems at the end of each chapter to enhance the reader's understanding of the material. There is a complete bibliography, with links to World Wide Web sites for GIS spatial analysis.
